The Ten Gods 十神
Output at opposite polarity — named for what it does to the Officer, and the one god the classics say must be taken to completion rather than moderated.
| Term 十神 | 伤官 — Hurting Officer (shang guan) |
|---|---|
| Relation to the Day Master | 我生 · 阴阳相异 — produced by the Day Master, opposite polarity |
| Group | Output |
伤官者，我生彼之谓，乃甲见丁、乙见丙之类，甲用辛为官，丁火乘旺，盗我之气，克制辛金，使不辅甲为贵，故名伤官。
The Hurting Officer means what I produce: the sort of case where Jia meets Ding, or Yi meets Bing. Jia takes Xin for its Officer; Ding fire rides its prime, steals my qi, and restrains the Xin metal so that it cannot support Jia into honour. Hence the name, Hurting Officer.
伤官虽凶，乃我所生，自家之物，伤尽则能生财，财旺则能生官，造化展转有情。
Though the Hurting Officer is inauspicious, it is what I myself produce — a thing of my own household. Hurt to the full it can produce Wealth, and Wealth in its prime can produce Officer; creation turns round and round, and there is feeling in it.
This is the only one of the ten named for its effect on another god rather than for what it is. The mechanism is two steps: it drains the Day Master, and it controls the stem that would have been the Direct Officer. 伤官见官，祸患百端 — Hurting Officer meeting Officer, trouble a hundredfold — is among the most quoted lines in the literature.
And then the chapter says the opposite of what that setup implies. The remedy is not less of it but more: 务要伤尽，方作贵看 — it must hurt to the full before it is read as honourable. Half-measures leave a damaged Officer in place; going all the way converts the relation into a chain that ends up producing office again by another route, through Wealth.
That argument — that the way out of a bad configuration can be to complete it rather than to soften it — is the reason this entry is worth reading in the original rather than in summary. Most English glosses render 伤官 as "rebellious" and stop, which loses the whole of the second half.
This is a lookup, not a judgement — it falls straight out of the element relation and the yin/yang match, and the table below is generated by the same function the chart calculator uses. Where the Day Master has its own essay, the name links to it.
| Day Master | This god is… |
|---|---|
| 甲 Jia yang Wood | 丁 — Ding |
| 乙 Yi yin Wood | 丙 — Bing |
| 丙 Bing yang Fire | 己 — Ji |
| 丁 Ding yin Fire | 戊 — Wu |
| 戊 Wu yang Earth | 辛 — Xin |
| 己 Ji yin Earth | 庚 — Geng |
| 庚 Geng yang Metal | 癸 — Gui |
| 辛 Xin yin Metal | 壬 — Ren |
| 壬 Ren yang Water | 乙 — Yi |
| 癸 Gui yin Water | 甲 — Jia |
Sources: 《三命通会》 (San Ming Tong Hui, Ming, 万民英) and 《子平真诠》 (Zi Ping Zhen Quan, Qing, 沈孝瞻 — the original text, without Xu Leyu's commentary). Every passage above is quoted from a local plain-text edition and verified character by character. Translations are ours; corrections are welcome.
Enter a birth date, time and longitude — the calculator returns the four pillars, the hidden stems, the nayin and the ten gods, with true solar time applied.
Open the chart calculator →正官 Direct Officer · 七杀 Seven Killings · 正印 Direct Resource · 偏印 Indirect Resource · 正财 Direct Wealth · 偏财 Indirect Wealth · 食神 Eating God · 比肩 Parallel · 劫财 Rob Wealth